Membrane tubulation by elongated and patchy nanoparticles

TL;DR

This paper models how elongated and patchy nanoparticles induce stable membrane tubulation through cooperative wrapping, offering insights into nanomaterial-membrane interactions and potential applications in membrane manipulation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that elongated and patchy particles can cooperatively induce stable membrane tubules across all interaction ranges, unlike spherical particles.

Findings

Elongated and patchy particles promote stable tubulation.

Cooperative wrapping enhances membrane stability.

Modeling confirms robustness across interaction ranges.

Abstract

Advances in nanotechnology lead to an increasing interest in how nanoparticles interact with biomembranes. Nanoparticles are wrapped spontaneously by biomembranes if the adhesive interactions between the particles and membranes compensate for the cost of membrane bending. In the last years, the cooperative wrapping of spherical nanoparticles in membrane tubules has been observed in experiments and simulations. For spherical nanoparticles, the stability of the particle-filled membrane tubules strongly depends on the range of the adhesive particle-membrane interactions. In this article, we show via modeling and energy minimization that elongated and patchy particles are wrapped cooperatively in membrane tubules that are highly stable for all ranges of the particle-membrane interactions, compared to individual wrapping of the particles. The cooperative wrapping of linear chains of elongated or patchy particles in membrane tubules may thus provide an efficient route to induce membrane tubulation, or to store such particles in membranes.